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Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Welcome To Vivek

India Economy Watch is a new project, and as such we hope it will be changing/evolving/improving quite a lot in the not to distant future. The most immediate change is that we'd like to welcome Vivek Oberoi to the team.

Our objective is India Economy Watch is to try with time to produce a non-sectarian forum where a wide variety of views associated with the hopes and difficulties for India's future can be debated. We also hope to bring you ongoing coverage of the most important developments in real-time: that is, as they happen.

IEW has no 'group line', but among the themes which interest us are: what kind of agriculture, the future of indian industry, structural and regulatory reform, trade and Cancun, IT business outsourcing, technology and simplicity, and, (of course) demography and economic growth, rural and urban India, is an alternative development path available to India etc etc.

We hope to have more news and more changes in the not too distant future, but meantime, and as a form of introduction, here's a piece Vivek wrote for Business Standard, back in the summer:

Have you seen Tea with Mussolini? It's quite a charming film - especially if you are the sort who loves art and Italy. The film is set in Italy at the time when the fascists were in power. At least one protagonist - an English lady - is happy with the turn of events.

She is happy that the trains run on time! Many Italians, of course, shared the same sentiment at the time. I have heard similar stories about the emergency in India. More than a few people have said that the emergency really wasn't so bad. The trains ran on time, everyone came to office at the right time and so on. The more things change, the more they remain the same! Meanwhile, this month The Atlantic Monthly carries an article in which "analysts at the RAND Corporation lay out 10 international security developments that aren't getting the attention they deserve".

One such international security development is the growing "Hindu-Muslim divide" in India. Rollie Lal, a political scientist at RAND writes, "A defining element of Indian politics since independence has been a commitment to secularism. That commitment is now at risk from an aggressive brand of Hindu nationalism that equates Indian national identity with Hindu religious identity." So what do the Italian fascists and the emergency in India have to do with each other? Well, both have their roots in stresses produced by rapid urbanisation and industrialisation.
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Claus and Edward's "Baker's Dozen"

Claus Vistesen and Edward Hugh are proud and happy to announce that they are now working as "featured analysts" with a new Boston-based start-up - Emerginvest.

Claus and Edward have used a new, updated, methodology in order to identify a group of 13 emerging economies which we consider are going to outperform both the rest of the emerging economy group and the OECD economies in terms of a number of key performance indicators over the 2008 - 2020 horizon.

Through our association with Emerginvest we hope to develop performance indicators which will confirm both the relevance and validity of the selection procedure adopted.

We would like to point out that we have absolutely no financial connection whatsoever with Emerginvest - although we do heartily endorse what they are trying to do.

In particular we see the move by the investment community towards emerging markets as one of the most effective and direct ways to address those issues of inter-country wealth and income imbalances which have plagued our planet for so long now - namely by getting the money from the rich who have it to the poor who need it.

Sending investment to emerging economies is also a way of addressing the underlying imbalances which exist between the relatively older populations of the developed economies who increasingly need to save, and the relatively younger emerging economies who can benefit from the investment of those savings in their countries. So in a way you can both ensure the future of your own pension and help attack poverty at one and the same time. This type of possibility is normally known in economics as "win-win".

The oldest known source and most probable origin for the expression "baker's dozen" dates to the 13th century in one of the earliest English statutes, instituted during the reign of Henry III (r. 1216-1272), called the Assize of Bread and Ale. Bakers who were found to have shortchanged customers could be liable to severe punishment. To guard against the punishment of losing a hand to an axe, a baker would give 13 for the price of 12, to be certain of not being known as a cheat. Specifically, the practice of baking 13 items for an intended dozen was to prevent "short measure", on the basis that one of the 13 could be lost, eaten, burnt or ruined in some way, leaving the baker with the original dozen.

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About Claus

Claus Vistesen is a 23 year old macroeconomist who is on the point of finishing his MSc in Applied Economics and Finance from the Copenhagen Business School. His primary research interests are international finance and international macroeconomics. Claus is especially interested in how the changing structure of global and national demographics impacts on local macroeconomic performance. Moreover - and as the wonk he ultimately is - he also takes a considerable interest issues and methodologies associated with econometrics, and this is an interest he intends to develop in his postgraduate research.

About Edward

Edward 'the bonobo' is a Catalan macroeconomist and economic demographer of British extraction, now based in Barcelona. By inclination he is a macroeconomist, but his deep-seated obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of contemporary demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".

He is currently working on a book with the provisional working title "Population, the Ultimate Non-renewable Resource".